Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

This obsession with the past, with something that someone did or how things should have been, as much as it hurts, is ego embodied.

Any ambitious person knows that feeling—that you must do great things, that you must get your way, and that if you don’t that you’re a worthless failure and the world is conspiring against you. There is so much pressure that eventually we all break under it or are broken by it.

CAN I GET EVEN MORE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS? You can also sign up for my monthly book recommendation e-mail. The list of recipients has grown to more than fifty thousand rabid, curious readers like yourself. You’ll get one e-mail per month, with recommendations from me based on my own personal reading. It kicks off with ten of my favorite books of all

Unless we use this moment as an opportunity to understand ourselves and our own mind better, ego will seek out failure like true north.

A broken person will not get there.

Everyone else has moved on, but you can’t, because you can’t see anything but your own way. You can’t conceive of accepting that someone could hurt you, deliberately or otherwise. So you hate.

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. — JOSEPH CONRAD

“People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.”

“See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.”